Basic reading skills in Swedish children with late developing language and with or without autism spectrum disorder or ADHD.
Kids with early language delay plus ASD or ADHD are very likely to read below age level by second grade, so screen early and intervene.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Miniscalco et al. (2010) looked at 7- to 8-year-old Swedish kids who had started talking late. Some had autism, some had ADHD, and some had neither. The team gave short tests of single-word reading and short-story comprehension.
They wanted to know if late talking plus ASD or ADHD made reading harder than late talking alone.
What they found
Kids with early language delay plus ASD or ADHD scored well below age norms on both decoding and understanding. The gap was large enough to flag risk for reading failure.
Children who only had late talking, without ASD or ADHD, stayed closer to average.
How this fits with other research
Åsberg Johnels et al. (2019) followed the same age group and showed that weak oral language at age 3 predicts poor-reader or hyperlexic profiles by age 8. Carmela’s snapshot lines up with that longer view.
Goodwin et al. (2017) seems to disagree. They found no difference in overall adaptive skills between ASD kids with or without early language delay once IQ and symptoms were matched. The key difference is domain: Anthony looked at daily living, while Carmela looked at reading. Language delay hurts academics, not necessarily every life skill.
Ferguson et al. (2020) also appear to clash. They saw equal phonological awareness and letter knowledge in well-matched 4-year-olds with and without ASD. Again, the kids were younger and had no language delay. Carmela’s group had both late talking and ASD/ADHD, showing that the double risk shows up by second grade.
Why it matters
If a child you serve has both early language delay and ASD or ADHD, do not wait for school failure. At age 7, run a quick one-minute word-reading probe and ask three literal comprehension questions. Low scores now mean you can add decoding and listening-comp goals to the behavior plan before gaps widen.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Reading skills at age 7-8 years were examined in a community-representative sample of 21 screened and clinically examined children with language delay (LD) followed prospectively from 2.5 years of age. The present study aimed to (1) determine whether these children with a history of LD had deficits in basic reading skills, i.e. decoding and comprehension, compared to the age norms of standardized tests, (2) analyze if there was a relationship between reading outcome and neuropsychiatric diagnosis by comparing three subgroups of children, LD pure, LD+ASD (autism spectrum disorder) and LD+ADHD, and, (3) determine what language measures at age 6 years were associated with the 7-8-year reading outcome. Both decoding and comprehension of single word reading were significantly below the norm for the whole LD group, where children with LD+ASD scored lowest, and children with LD highest. However, the differences between the three groups did not reach significance. Two reader groups were identified according to the results of word decoding and comprehension, respectively, resulting in the same 7 children. ANOVA revealed that the only differences on the 6-year language tests between the two groups were found on color naming and word memory. This study has shown that children with LD and subsequently identified neurodevelopmental problems such as ASD and ADHD experience continued deficits, demonstrated also in reading skills and that the picture of the reading problems seemed to resemble those of typically developing children.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2010 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2010.04.004